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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

Big Oil attempts to end-run Keystone XL

The oil industry is planning an end-run around the President and State Department as they linger over the impending decision on whether to authorize the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline by pushing for Big Oil friendly Congressional approval of the project.

Canada's Plan to Get Rich by Trashing the Climate

Like every other country in the world, Canada has promised to help keep global warming to less than 2 degrees C. However Canada's political and corporate leadership are committed to turning the country into a fossil-fuelled “energy superpower.” With a drug lord's just-providing-a-service hypocrisy Canada has openly declared it's future is tied to the profits from dumping hundreds of millions of tonnes of climate-heating carbon into the atmosphere every year.

Keystone supporters hit back at Pelosi's export criticism

The energy industry is lashing out at a senior U.S. Democrat who suggested that oil flowing through the Keystone XL pipeline is destined for export, a criticism that strikes at the heart of the rationale for the controversial project.

Keystone XL pipeline not a climate change cure

Barack Obama has seen protesters from his motorcade for years: McCain and Romney campaign supporters, health care reform opponents and all manner of Tea Party acolytes. But when he left Argonne National Laboratory in a cold rain outside Chicago on Friday, there was another breed altogether: environmentalists bearing bright hand-painted signs with messages like, “No XL Pipeline.”

Obama's opportunity to get serious on climate change

On Presidents' Day weekend, I was among the 35,000 who attended the Forward On Climate rally in Washington, D.C. to urge President Obama to make good on the promise in his second inaugural address to "respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations." The rally took aim specifically at Keystone XL, the hotly contested 1,700 mile pipeline project that would carry tar sands oil from northern Alberta, Canada all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Comments

How can I even respond to all this without knowing that my comments will be deleted?

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Moderator Response: [DB] Do as bill advises below: consult the Comments Policy, take it to heart and always compose your comments to comply with it. You will then have no issues with moderation, as similarly do the vast majority of participants in this venue.

Gee, let's see now, you don't know if your comments will be deleted, and this concerns you? (In fact you appear to be reluctant to make any unless you can be reasonably certain they will be deleted! Could this be what's known as a Freudian error? ;-) )

Here's a suggestion; try reading the comments policy (handy link above), comprehending it, and then making them! See what happens!

(If you reverse-engineer it enough you might even achieve your apparent goal! But I'm being facetious, of course; you wouldn't want to do that...)

John Hartz, your choice of linked-to articles show an extremely heavy left-wing liberal bias. Are you posting articles that you personally like (and that is ok), or are you posting articles that advance the science?

Please provide a proof to your point that John shows "extremely heavy left-wing liberal bias". If I was you, I would not pronounce such heavy weighed opinion without any proof (in this case an alternative choice of articles that acurately analyse KXL from an oposing, say right-wing, conservative point of view) otherwise, I could just be accused of sloganeering.

Accordingly, I am interested in analysing any reputable article that you are going to cite, or I'm going to ignore the sloganeering.

On a more serious note, current American politics seems to involve the Republican party denying the scientific basis of reality, in favor of emotional/ideological constructs. It's a very sad state of affairs - the Republicans used to be the party concerned about the environment, but are now the party of social issues over facts...

What could I say that could be deleted? My comment to the effect that skepticalscience should not be saying that the U. S. State Department is being fraudulent.

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Moderator Response: [JH] The contents of the articles linked to in the OP stand or fall on their own merits. SkS provides these links as a service to its readers. Readers are encouraged to provide links to other articles about the Alberta Tar Sands and the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project in this comment thread.

My opinion used to be that this site was politically dispassionate and concerned itself only with scientific facts. But I've had to revise that, because whenever energy is discussed there is an exclusive and overweening concentration on renewables. It surely hasn't escaped the attention of the people who edit this site that it's highly controversial as to whether renewables can provide more than a minor contribution to the AGW problem. This was pointed out most prominently in the UK by MacKay of course, but he's by far from the onlyqualified person arguing this (another tip: Scottish Engineers).

Renewables as the panacea betrays a political agenda, which, it seems, is more important to the authors of this site than global warming.

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Moderator Response: [JH] As stated in the SkS Comments Policy, we have a zero tolerance approach to trolling and sloganeering. Please cease and desist from doing either.

Sotolith, I'd say that a remark such as "it's highly controversial as to whether renewables can provide more than a minor contribution to the AGW problem" is at least suggestive of a bias in itself, let alone for the moment being contradicted by facts.

A case can be made that many people are deeply conflicted over technological choices we need to make in order to confront the subsitution problem required to deal with global warming. This dissonance might express itself as antipathy to a particular technology due to perceived ideological associations, which I think is often the case w/"renewable" (fusion-powered) energy capture/liberation systems, or it might be expressed by unreasoning fear of more judicious and scrupulous application of technologies with a somewhat dubious history of failure statistics.

Pragmatism expresses itself best in such cases as China, where even as the country moves to consolidate and improve coal generation systems, plans for nuclear generators go ahead and simultaneously the WE of well over10 fission plants has been already installed in the form of "renewable" (fusion-powered) domestic hot water augmentation. Parenthetically, it is in the latter case that your supposition of the scant potential contribution of "renewable" (fusion-powered) energy capture/liberation schemes fails to comport with facts.

Compartmentalizing distaste for so-called "enviromentalists" and separating actual risk and hazard from visceral fear will be very helpful in performing clear-eyed assessments of technological choices. In at least some cases doing so makes the matter of choice much easier; paralysis over unjustified and often irrelevant abstractions is not helpful to improving our situation.

sotolith7 - Having read MacKays book, I would have to agree with him - on the point that the UK cannot generate enough renewable power within the confines of the UK to replace all of their energy use. Not enough area, too far north WRT solar, etc. Note that he does not argue this on a world-wide basis, however.

Of course, even now the UK is an energy importer according to the World Bank, importing between 20-30% of its energy over the last few years. If they were to import that as electricity sourced in, say, North Africa, rather than oil from the MidEast, I really don't see that as a barrier.

If you wish to discuss such matters further, I would suggest taking it to whichever thread on renewables you feel is most appropriate. Most readers follow the recent Comments page, and will see such a post on whatever thread it is made.

It is pretty hard to see how we can fight global warming without using renewables. Given that hydroelectic is also a renewable, the main alternative to both fossil fuels and renewables is nuclear power, which I personally strongly support. but is itself very controversial.

My issue with the anti-Keystone movement is not about whether we should be using hydrocarbons or renewables. Few people expect us to convert to renewable power tomorrow. A lot of scientists are promoting an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which really means an 80% reduction of fossil fuel use. The issue is whether the remaining 20% of fossil fuels in North America should come from overseas or from North American sources. Flaring over OPEC countries or potential "Exxon Valdez'" will not save the polar bear. And whether or not the remaining 20% of hydrocarbon consumption in 2050 leaves room for Keystone and the Alberta oil sands should be for the market to decide. Unless you are an investor, worse things could happen than for Keystone to be built, but not used because of everybody driving an electric car.

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